


the path ahead, the path behind it

by skybelow



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Hunters, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bisexual Nancy Wheeler, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Everyone Has Issues, F/F, Lesbian Robin Buckley, Multi, Past Jonathan Byers/Nancy Wheeler, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:22:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27337861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skybelow/pseuds/skybelow
Summary: Five years after getting a full-ride to NYU for writing an exposé on Hawkins, Indiana, Nancy Wheeler's career hasn't gone anywhere other being the subject of Jonathan Byer's most popular photography, until one night when Steve shows up at her apartment because he and Robin need her help figuring out what's responsible for mysterious animal attacks in a small town.Or, Steve and Robin drive across the country in a '67 Chevy Impala saving people and hunting things with Dustin running their base of operations from a bunker in Kansas, and now they need Nancy's help to save a small town plagued by monsters straight out of the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, much to Robin's displeasure.
Relationships: Robin Buckley & Nancy Wheeler, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington & Dustin Henderson, Robin Buckley/Nancy Wheeler, Steve Harrington & Dustin Henderson
Comments: 5
Kudos: 19





	1. Chapter 1

“Fuck Jonathan!” Nancy Wheeler shouted over the loud music as she threw back another shot, and the group of girls around her all cheered in agreement. She and her roommate Jennie had befriended a group of sorority girls at the bar they were at, and it seemed like everyone there had the same attitude for the night: Fuck Men.

“I’m, like, my own person, you know?” she slurred to a blonde in a crop top. Nancy was too drunk to remember all their names, even though they had all introduced themselves. She was also pretty sure there was more than one Rachel here anyways.

“Yeah, totally, like be independent! You don’t need him! He’s only going to bring you down!”

“See?” Nancy said as she turned to face Jennie. “I’m independent. I don’t need him.”

“Yeah, Nance?”

“Yeah!” Nancy stumbled for a second but caught herself. “It’s different this time. I’m _done!_ Fuck Jonathan!”

“I heard you the first thousand times, babe.”

Tears were starting to well up in Nancy’s eyes as she said, “I wanna have fun, ya know?”

Before she could respond, the song changed and another one of the girls - maybe one of the Rachel’s? - dragged Nancy and the blonde girl away from the bar onto the dance floor. Jennie leaned back onto the bar while she sipped a rum and Coke. Nancy never used to be like this, but maybe this was what she needed right now. Now that she and Jonathan _seemed_ to be done for good, maybe Nancy would finally have a chance to become her own person, she’d change. Jennie was hoping that this part of it was just a phase, though.

“Jen! Come dance!” Nancy had run back over, pushing through the crowd of people to get back over to her. “It’ll be fun!” Her eyes looked bright but glassed over, and it was one of the only times Nancy had smiled all week. Then again, Nancy only seemed to smile when she was out drunk at a party or a bar these days. It was definitely a shift from all of the classy “high society” events she had always gone out to with Jonathan where she described sipping on drinks made from a bottle of alcohol that cost more than Jennie made in a month.

Maybe this was more Nancy’s speed - casual, dressed in normal clothes for a normal girl in her twenties, getting drunk at a normal bar with normal girls. Also, getting the chance to have a night out for herself and not just to be on the arm of her photographer boyfriend as his _muse_ , or to talk him up all night.

Jennie swallowed the rest of her drink in one giant gulp and let Nancy drag her out onto the floor.

* * *

Eventually, she helped Nancy stumble home and up the stairs to their apartment.

“I just wanna do what I wanna do, ya know, Jennie?”

“I know, babe,” Jennie said, unlocking the door. This was the third time Nancy was going through this conversation with herself.

“And if I wanna go to Chicago, I can go to Chicago!”

“You sure can.”

“He doesn’t own me, ya know?” Nancy slumped onto the ground right as their front door unlocked. “He’s with those naked models all the time, and I don’t say _anything_!”

“Hey, let’s get inside,” she said, trying to pull Nancy up from the hallway floor before they woke any of their neighbors up and caused a scene.

Nancy was crying now, “The only time he wants me is when he’s trying to get me back. He’s seen them naked more than he’s seen me.”

Jennie physically winced. This hadn’t come up before, but Nancy hadn’t been this drunk before. She managed to wrestle Nancy to her feet and guide her into the apartment. Once Nancy stopped crying, Jennie got her tucked into bed, laid on her side with water on the nightstand and a trash can on the floor, and left the door cracked.

The room was spinning. This was the only thing Nancy knew for sure. She didn’t know how she got home and into her bed - she was pretty sure she was home and in her bed - but the room she was in was definitely spinning. She slowly kept opening and closing her eyes, trying to figure out which was worse. Right as she decided that closed was definitely worse, she heard a knock on the front door.

_Maybe if I just lay here, really still, the room will stop spinning, and they_ _’ll go away._ She thought to herself. She lay there, staring straight up at the ceiling, trying to will herself to feel better before tomorrow came.

Then she heard the voice. Jennie’s voice was there, too, but she was definitely talking to someone with a deep male voice. _Whatever, maybe she ordered us food. They_ _’ll go away soon enough_ , she thought to herself, until she heard his footsteps inside and the kitchen light turned on. She could see it through the crack in her open door. It was Jonathan. It had to be. Who else would be here at this hour of the night? Suddenly filled with a panic that maybe she had called or texted him at some point between her fourth tequila shot and her bed, she scrambled up and collapsed onto the floor with her legs still tangled in the sheets, hitting her arm on the trash can her roommate had left for her. _Damn Jennie taking care of me and tucking me in_. Nancy stood up as fast as she could, and immediately the room started spinning even more violently than before. But _Jonathan_ was _here_ in her _apartment!_ And all that mattered was getting him out of here as fast as possible. She wasn’t going through this again.

She had to stop to orient herself after whipping the bedroom door all the way open, and even still, she slammed into the door frame, and then into the wall of the hallway as she stumbled to the kitchen table.

“Jonathan! Getta _fuck_ outta mihouse! I told you to never come back!” she shouted as she made her way towards him, her hand in front of her face in anticipation of the light being on. “Fuck y-” When her eyes adjusted enough to the brightness that she could tell what was going on, Nancy gasped so violently that she started coughing. Jonathan wasn’t here at all. Instead, sitting at the kitchen table, across from Jennie, was Steve.

* * *

Six things happened all at once, even though it all felt like slow motion to Nancy. One, she realized she wasn’t wearing any pants. Jennie had taken off her pants and her shirt, leaving her in just panties and a bralette. Two, she was suddenly realizing just how badly the room was spinning, combined with how much she had had to drink. Three, Nancy fell down onto the floor. Four, Steve jumped up and started to move toward Nancy. Five, just as Steve got up, Nancy also got up and ran into the bathroom, just in time to throw up her dinner and everything she had drank that night. Six, Steve followed Nancy into the bathroom and held her hair back.

Nancy wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and looked up at Steve as he slowly let her hair go. “You’re not Jonathan.”

He winced a little at the smell of vomit on her breath, but didn’t move away, “No, I’m not. Let’s get you cleaned up.” She nodded and tried to take his hand to pull herself off the bathroom floor, but that movement alone was enough to send her stomach rolling again.

Nancy spent the night on the bathroom floor either next to or face deep in the toilet, coming in and out of consciousness. At different points, a glass of water materialized next to her, and she woke up with a blanket laid over her.

* * *

The next morning, Nancy woke up in her bed. She wasn’t sure how she got back there after being on the bathroom floor, but it was a welcome comfort because of how her body ached from lying on the tile and vomiting all night long. Even her feet hurt from the heels she had worn the night before. Walking to and from the bar and dancing all night was a lot harder on your feet than taking a car to and from a venue where all you did was stand, sit, walk, and make small talk all night long, like a _sophisticated_ person. She dragged herself out of bed when she smelled Jennie cooking breakfast and forced herself into the shower, taking note of how clean the bathroom seemed. Either it hadn’t been that bad last night, or Jennie had cleaned it this morning. She grimaced at the thought of her roommate doing that for her, hoping she had just been pretty lucky. Nancy took her time in the shower, and then when she got out, she decided to walk to the kitchen in just her towel, like she usually did, to grab a cup of coffee to drink while Jennie finished cooking and she got dressed.

She saw that Jennie was making a weird face when Nancy walked by, but didn’t get a chance to say anything before Steve said, “Shit! Nancy!” She turned around and saw him standing in front of their couch, turning away with his hands up to cover his eyes.

“Shit!” Nancy said, catching her towel as it slipped but dropping the mug she had grabbed. Jennie dove in time to catch it, but knocked her spatula off the counter. Steve started to turn and move towards them when he heard it, but then remembered Nancy was in a towel - one that was starting to slip off after she jumped when she heard him, at that.

Nancy opened and closed her mouth as she clutched at the towel, looking between the two of them, trying to figure out what to say before she took a deep breath and said, in a very tense voice, “I’ll be right back. Excuse me,” and walked off to her bedroom with all the composure she could muster.

As soon as the door closed behind her, the panic began. Steve was here? Right. Steve was here. _Right?_ That actually happened last night, and it wasn’t just a weird dream that she had while dying on the bathroom floor? Most importantly, _why_ was he here? In New York City? The last time she saw him was in passing one of the times she had been home for Christmas. Or was it Thanksgiving? It had been…how many years? None of this made sense. Maybe Jonathan had called Steve to come over and… And what? Why would he have _Steve,_ of all people, drive from Hawkins, of all places - at least, she thought he was still in Hawkins - to come talk to her? Maybe he hoped a different ex of hers could “talk some sense into her” or something. She sat on her bed, wrapped in a towel, trying to piece together how this was related and what it meant, when she heard a soft knock on her door.

“I’m not dressed yet,” she said, still in that tense voice.

The door unlatched and Jennie’s voice floated into the room just as she did, “I know, Nance.” She walked over and sat next to Nancy on the bed, putting her arm around her. “Rough night?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” she said, burying her face in her hands as she leaned into Jennie. “I don’t even remember anything other than tequila and puking my guts up all night.”

She couldn’t help but laugh, “You know, that’s mostly it, to be honest.” Nancy smiled and lowered her hands. “Except for, you know, the strange man showing up on our doorstep in the middle of the night with no explanation at all. That part was probably worth mentioning.”

Nancy turned red, but she wasn’t quite sure why. She had no more of an idea why Steve Harrington was in her apartment than Jennie did. “I wish I could tell you, but I-”

“Nancy, I know who he is,” she said softly. Nancy’s eyes widened and she wasn’t quite sure what to say. She thought she did so well hiding her life in Hawkins from everyone she had met. Except for, of course, the part where her exposé on what had been covered up in Hawkins is what got her the full-ride to NYU in the first place. She had never mentioned Steve, and the focus of her story was a lot more centered on government cover-ups and the supernatural phenomenons associated with them than high school ex-boyfriends. She turned to look at Jennie, hoping for some kind of explanation.

“The name Steve Harrington is one that definitely rings a bell. Plus the hair, like, oh my God.” Nancy let out a laugh at the hair comment. But that still didn’t clear up any of her confusion. “I remember reading _everything_ I could about the Hawkins Lab conspiracy when it first came out. It was so thrilling, you know? Like, obviously not for you because you lived it, but to be an ordinary person? And to read all these articles that keep coming out about all the layers of government cover up and ruined experiments that happened in a normal looking small town, where next to no one knew about it even as it was all happening? That shit is wild. I had mostly forgotten about it by the time we met, and didn’t realize who you were until later, and you didn’t want to talk about it, so I just pretended I didn’t know anything, and-”

“You’re fine, Jen. You don’t need to apologize or explain yourself for that.”

“I didn’t know who he was when I opened the door. I figured it was one of Jonathan’s dumbass friends here to harass you or something, but then when he said his name, and that he was here for you, it hit me.”

Nancy bit her lip nervously and nodded. “Did he say why he was here for me?” she asked after a pause.

Jennie shook her head, “I have no idea. He really hadn’t said too much before you came crashing out yelling at him last night.” Nancy looked down at her hands in her lap. “Then he was helping you out in the bathroom for a while before eventually crashing on the couch. I figured maybe he said something between all the puking that you would remember. He’s been friendly this morning, but I can tell there’s something he really wants to talk to you about.”

“I haven’t even heard from him in years. Not a call, not a text, not anything at all. I have no fucking idea why he’s here or what’s so important.” She paused and grabbed her phone, making sure she hadn’t missed anything from her mom or Mike or even Holly, who they all still called Baby Holly even though she was starting high school this year. “Yeah, nothing,” she said, scrolling through texts from people she had met in New York. Nothing related to Hawkins for at least a month or so. The last text from Mike was a picture of a cat dressed up as an elf that he had sent her.

Nancy shrugged and set her phone back down on the nightstand.

“Maybe you should go talk to him. See what he wants. There’s no harm in that, right?” she said.

“I guess so. I mean, if something really terrible had happened I figured I’d probably know by now, right?” Her roommate nodded. “And _he_ wouldn’t be the one to tell me, either.” Her mind ran through a list of everyone that would have told her before _Steve Harrington_. Her family, El, Max, Dustin, Lucas, Will, even Jonathan. Steve wasn’t even an afterthought.

“Get dressed. I’ll get you a plate ready,” she said, giving Nancy one last squeeze around the shoulders before standing up and shutting the door behind her. Nancy took a deep breath and then looked for a shirt and some leggings.


	2. Chapter 2

Breakfast was weird, to say the least. Nancy and Jennie only had two chairs at their tiny kitchen table, so the two of them sat there while Steve sat on the couch, using the coffee table as his table. But he was chatting with them like it was perfectly normal and he was sitting right next to them instead of several feet away, practically in another room.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been to New York before,” he said, taking a bite of bacon. “Wait, no, I take that back. My parents brought me once when I was a kid, like seven or something, when my dad was here for a conference.”

“Oh, I remember that,” Nancy said, starting to light up, but then realizing how uncomfortable it was to have so many memories of Hawkins that she had completely forgot about. “You were such a little shit when you came back.”

“I was not!”

“You bragged for a week straight about it! I never thought I was going to hear the end of it!”

Steve turned to Jennie, “She’s making this up.”

Nancy deepened her voice to mimic Steve’s, “I went to Broadway, I went to the empire state building, I went to the statue of liberty, I saw so many celebrities, I rode the subway, I’m so much cooler than you are.”

He shook his head, “I don’t know where she’s getting this from.”

Nancy rolled her eyes with a smile, “Of course you don’t, Steve Harrington.”

They shared a look, acknowledging that they both remembered it, maybe not quite as Nancy had put it but pretty close, and knowing that even the last time she saw Steve, he had changed into a much more compassionate person, less concerned with being cooler than everyone else around him.

“Yeah, well, there’s still the same old stuff, you know. Lady Liberty, tall buildings…rats,” Jennie said. Nancy laughed but then suddenly remembered the rats in Hawkins that summer and how that changed everything. She wouldn’t even be in New York if she had just ignored that call about the rabid rats. Steve noticed this and quickly changed the subject.

“I’ve heard there’s lots of good places to eat here. Like, more than any person could ever eat.”

“Yeah, maybe Nance could show you around, or I could go pick something up,” Jennie said, looking at Nancy for direction.

“We could maybe get some takeout later from across the street. It’s nothing like that shitty Chinese place in Hawkins.”

“The one they kept renaming to keep it from going completely out of business?” Steve suggested.

“Yeah,” Nancy smiled. “China Star, China Buffet, Lucky Panda, Panda Star…”

“Last I heard it was still kicking as Little Panda,” he said. She noted the way he said it, like he hadn’t been in Hawkins for a while, yet he hadn’t mentioned where he’d been since then.

Jennie started clearing off their plates and putting them in the sink. “I’m going to head out to try to get some work done. If you want me to bring food back later, just let me know,” she said, stuffing her laptop and a stack of papers into a backpack.

“It was great meeting you,” Steve said, shaking her hand as she headed for the door.

“You, too. Don’t get into any trouble while I’m gone.”

“Oh, we won’t,” Nancy said.

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Steve added. Jennie smiled at them both and then headed out the door. “Her thesis is pretty impressive. She was telling me all about it this morning before you got-”

“What do you want, Steve?” Nancy had her arms crossed over her chest and was eyeing him suspiciously. The casual conversation she’d kept up while her roommate was around was gone, and he figured there was no point continuing to beat around the bush if Nancy wanted to get right into it.

“You might want to sit down for this, Nancy.”

Nancy didn’t take her eyes off Steve as she backed up to the couch and took a seat. _“What_ are you doing here?” He sat down across from her and took a deep breath but still didn’t speak. “Is this about Jonathan? Because if it is, I swear to God, Steve Harrington, I-”

“No! What? No, this isn’t about Jonathan at all,” Steve said, wondering why that’s what she had jumped to first.

“Well, then what _is_ it about?” she snapped back. “Because I am too hungover for any bullshit right now.”

“Remember Hawkins?”

“Yeah, unfortunately, yes. I spent the first eighteen years of my life there it’s not like I can just black it all out completely.”

Steve ran a hand through his hair, “No, that’s not what I meant. I mean, do you remember the ‘Hawkins Conspiracy’? Everything you wrote about?”

She narrowed her eyes, “Yes, but why? I’m _not_ about to go back there, if that’s what this is about.”

“No, it’s not-” he cut himself off. “Nancy, I need your help.”

“With what? In case you haven’t noticed I’m not exactly writing thrilling exposes on government conspiracies at the moment.”

Steve chuckled to himself.

“Speaking of, what are you doing that could possibly need my help? So desperately that you drove to New York City in the middle of the goddamn night to show up on my doorstep without so much as a call or a text.” She paused. “How did you even find out where I live?”

“Dustin’s pretty good at that kind of stuff,” he shrugged her concerns off.

“Wait, Dustin’s involved in this, too? What game are you trying to play, Steve? Please, just tell me - why are you here?”

“Robin and I, along with Dustin’s help sometimes, we…hunt…things.”

“Congratulations, Steve. You know there are reasons I moved to the _city_ from Hawkins, and surprisingly, that’s one of them.”

“No, not like deer, Nance. Like, remember the demogorgon? And the mind flayer?” She nodded, looking paler than before. “We hunt things like that. Things that go bump in the night. People’s worst nightmares. There’s a lot more evil and darkness out there than just Hawkins Lab.”

“I don’t understand. There’s more upside downs?”

“No, not quite. Hauntings, ghosts, demons. More of that sort of thing.”

“I- what?” Nancy shook her head and walked around to the other side of the coffee table. “None of that is real, Steve. It can’t be.”

“Just like a supernatural creature coming into our dimension from another one that was created by a little girl ripping a hole in space and time?”

“That was _different_.”

“Different _how?_ ” he asked.

“There was a real explanation for it. El was created through experiments and they forced her to do something horrible. But ghosts aren’t real!”

“You’d be surprised at how much goes on that you don’t know about, especially living in a city like this.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Come with me,” Steve said, grabbing a backpack off the floor and opening the front door to her apartment.

“Where are we going?”

“On a field trip.”

Steve walked her down the streets until he found an alley that looked abandoned enough. He stopped halfway down it and unzipped his backpack. The first thing he did was pull out a bag of salt and pour it in a circle around them.

“Wha-”

“Please, just save your questions until the end.”

Then he pulled out a small pouch and opened it to grab out a lock of blonde hair.

“Come on, Deborah, I know you’re here,” he said to no one in particular, looking around in every direction, like he was expecting someone. Nancy looked around as well, waiting for Jennie, or even Robin or Dustin, to jump out and announce that this was all some kind of joke.

Then, a girl about her age in a white dress materialized to the left of them. She didn’t look completely solid - Nancy could almost see through her, like she was a gauzy curtain. She came towards them, hand outstretched, and Nancy tried to take a step back.

“Don’t!” He grabbed her arm, hard, and pulled her back next to him. She winced, definitely feeling the pain from when she slammed it into the trash can earlier. “She can’t cross the salt. Look.”

She was tensed and ready to take off running, but she waited and sure enough, the girl couldn’t reach over or step past the salt line. Now that she was closer, Nancy could see that she was crying. “Steve, what’s going on?”

He ignored her, his eyes on this ghost in front of them.

“I’m sorry, Deborah. Thank you for your patience.” It looked to Nancy like she was nodding. Then Steve let go of her arm and pulled a lighter out of his pocket. He lit the flame and touched it to the lock of hair, and just as it caught flames, so did she. In a matter of seconds, the girl and the piece of hair were both just ashes blown away by a breeze.

Steve nonchalantly started zipping his bag back up and walking back towards the street. Nancy was still frozen in place, trying to process what she saw and when she snapped out of it, she had to run to catch up to him.

“Steve, what was that?”

“Oh, Deborah? She was a ghost,” he said, not slowing down as he walked up the street.

“Yeah, but what _was_ that?”

“Just doing my job. She was actually a lot better than most. We probably didn’t even need the salt ring, but it’s best practice, you know?”

“No, Steve! I don’t know! What did you do to her?”

“Got rid of her, for good. She’s been following me since Pennsylvania, but I wanted to be able to give you an example. She was so desperate to not be stuck here anymore that she was willing to wait till I found you for me to do it. Her husband killed her but kept a piece of her hair. She wasn’t hurting anyone, just causing a whole lot of ruckus and scaring people trying to get someone to help her out. So I helped her out, found the hair, explained I needed to burn it to release her and what I needed your help with, and she was willing to follow along.”

“Steve!” she yanked on his arm and pulled him to a stop. “You can’t just say all this like it’s some casual thing to kill ghosts! That’s not a job!”

They were in the middle of a busy street, and the fact that they were stopped and taking up space was causing more of a problem than the conversation they were having.

“Yeah, it is. Maybe not to you, but to me and Robin, it is. This is what we do. We save people, we hunt these things, and we do some good in the world.” Nancy was still shaking her head in disbelief. “Not everyone got full ride scholarships to college, Nancy. Some of us had to fight our way out of Hawkins doing whatever we could.”

She gasped. “That’s not fair.”

“No, you know what’s not fair? It’s that some of us got scholarships from it, and the rest of us just got trauma and an overwhelming urge to put themselves in danger in the hopes that someone else doesn’t have to experience what we went through. So that other people know that even if there’s some monster lurking in the dark, someone’s going to come help them fight it. We can’t all be part of ‘New York’s Up and Coming Young Elites’,” he finished, slapping her in the face with the title of a magazine article from a few months ago centered on Jonathan’s rise to fame and popularity and Nancy’s role alongside him in it all.

The look of shock and betrayal on her face sent him into regret instantly. He needed her help, and insulting her and throwing her success into her face wasn’t going to get him anywhere with her.

“Nancy, I’m sorry,” he said, in a much softer tone of voice. “I really do need your help, we all do. Me, Robin, and a whole town of kids who are in danger of getting hurt. I need you to help me before something really bad happens, and they’re not being very responsive to us.”

Nancy crossed her arms over her chest, “I’ll think about it.”

And with that, she walked back to her apartment, Steve trailing behind her.


End file.
